Uplift 2 is a continuation of the original Uplift project, which was successfully demonstrated at a school for children with Cerebral Palsy in Monterrey Mexico. The original project was designed to provide low-income families, living in very small homes with a ultra-low cost alternative to transporting their kids around the house. We were contacted by another school in New Hampshire to help them create a way for one of their students with cerebral plays, Juan, to be more engaged in the hands-on classroom activities. We couldn't simply use the original chair because it was designed for indoor use to lift the user while Juan's problem was that he could not reach the ground level plant beds that are used in some of their classes. We still wanted to create a wheelchair that was affordable, but we also wanted the chair to last Juan many years.

We decided to take an entirely different approach than in the original Uplift project and create a wheelchair lift attachment that could be used in many different chairs. We spent allot of time looking at the lift mechanism, looking for simple ball-screw mechanisms to full on hydraulic lifts. We eventually settled on a scissor lift design as it can collapse to a fourth of its extended size. We looked at two different versions of a scissor lift design, a more basic design where the top and bottom anchors of the lift slid on rails and a more complicated one where the rails were replaced with levers attached to each other to replicate the sliding motion. We chose the more complicated design because the sliding rails had many downsides, mainly that the chair could rock front and back as well as side to side, even with the lift locked. We made a motorized version of this design where the lift is pulled up with a ball screw. In the next iteration, we plan to make an attachment system to affix the lift to the wheelbase of the chair.